Elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge should expand to prevent the
annual scramble for places at the most sought-after institutions, the higher
education minister David Willetts has said.

More undergraduate places need to be created at “heavily oversubscribed” universities to enable thousands of bright teenagers to attend, according to David Willetts.

He said vice-chancellors should take advantage of Government reforms designed to give universities in England more freedom to recruit students with the best A-level grades.

Some leading institutions, including Oxbridge, have resisted pressure to expand amid fears over crowded seminars and the cost of subsiding extra students.

But in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Willetts called on the most popular institutions to “find ways in which they can finance growth in the number of undergraduates” to give more young people the “opportunity to go to a prestigious university”.

He also criticised the “extraordinary” rules imposed by local councillors in Oxford which prevent more students living in rented housing in the city - placing further curbs on growth.

The comments came as almost 300,000 sixth-formers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland prepared to receive their A-level results today.

Experts are already predicting that results will flatline – or even drop – this year following an official crackdown by the exams regulator on “grade inflation”. Just over eight per cent of papers are set to be awarded an A* and 27 per cent will be graded an A.

Students starting degree courses this autumn will also be the first to pay up to £9,000-a-year in tuition fees – almost three times the previous rate – as part of controversial Coalition reforms designed to shift funding from the state to individual students.

It has already triggered a rush for places at the best universities as students seek more value for money for higher fees. As many as 12,000 applicants have already been rejected by both Oxford and Cambridge.

For the first time this year, universities will get new powers to admit unlimited numbers of students with at least two As and B at A-level – relaxing tight number controls exercised by the last Government.

Institutions such as Bristol, University College London, Newcastle, Birmingham and Exeter have already indicated that extra places are being made available under the reforms. Bristol is taking 600 more AAB students, while 300 are being admitted to UCL.

But Mr Willetts insisted it should be used as an opportunity for other “oversubscribed universities to expand”.

“If they really are heavily oversubscribed, well one thing they can do is to offer more places to suitably qualified candidates so that more people have a chance,” he said.

“It takes time to invest in a campus and grow a university, but I would love to see some of our most popular universities grow.”

Oxford and Cambridge have claimed they collectively lose around £200m every year subsidising undergraduates because existing funding levels fail to cover the full cost of tuition, including one-to-one tutorials with dons.

Mr Willetts said: “Of course, Oxford and Cambridge claim that it costs more to educate an undergraduate than the current level of the fees and so they say that it has to be cross-subsidised out of the university’s own resources – they can’t afford to take on more.

“In Oxford’s case, there is this extraordinary arrangement in which the council has limited the number of places in private, rented accommodation, which in turn limits the size of the university.

“Again, it is a complicated story but I hope in the future it would be possible… that those universities would be able to find ways in which they can finance growth in the number of undergraduates.”

Cambridge said it had “no plans to change our intake profile”.

A spokeswoman for Oxford said: “The lifting of the cap on recruiting AAB students does not change anything for Oxford University. All of Oxford’s 17,000 applicants are predicted straight A grades – the entry requirement at Oxford has been AAA for many years – and the university has no plans to expand undergraduate numbers further.”

The cap on student tuition fees will soar to £9,000 this year, with almost all members of the elite Russell Group charging the maximum price for courses, although poor students can win generous grants.

One study published on Wednesday by the insurer LV= suggested students could graduate with average debts of more than £53,000 when accommodation and living costs are added, rising to £65,000 in London.

Mr Willetts told the Telegraph that students should expect better tuition for the higher fee, with universities being forced to give undergraduates written guarantees on the amount of lecture time, number of seminars and quality of academic feedback.

Students should be encouraged to rate universities’ performance and publicly shame those providing substandard tuition, he said.

But Mr Willetts warned that students paying higher fees could not expect to be “spoon-fed”.

“The fees are meeting the costs of an education; they cannot be a guarantee of a particular level of degree,” he said.

“You are entitled to expect a better teaching experience and I think that should be one of the benefits of our reforms, but you can’t say, ‘therefore I’m entitled to a 2:1’.”

He added: “This is one of the great tensions and certainly students are not there to be spoon-fed. It is about independent thought. But universities shouldn’t use the argument about students studying independently to disguise a failure to deliver proper teaching and academic engagement.”

In further comments, Mr Willetts also suggested that some universities had “lost confidence” in A-levels because they failed to properly discriminate between bright and average students. The Coalition is now planning to scrap bite-sized modules and give universities more power to script syllabuses and exam questions as part of an overhaul of the “gold standard” exam.

He said: “A-levels have to be sufficiently rigorous to provide universities with the information they need to discriminate between students and work out who is best suited to go. And some universities have lost confidence that all A-levels can do that so this makes the case for maintaining the A-level standards.

“But, equally, universities are entitled to look beyond A-levels. Getting a place at university is not simply a reward for your A-level marks; it is not how the system works in the US or on the continent.”